Ang Lee wins 2nd Golden Lion for sex thriller

Lee, who won the Golden Lion and an Oscar for his groundbreaking 2005 gay cowboy movie “Brokeback Mountain”, dedicated his win to Swedish film legend Ingmar Bergman who died this year.

Australia’s Cate Blanchett and U.S. star Brad Pitt won the awards for best actress and actor while veteran U.S. director Brian De Palma won a special Silver Lion award for his hard-hitting Iraq war film “Redacted”.

The best screenplay prize went to British director Ken Loach for his depiction of exploited immigrants in London in “It’s a Free World”.

Lee’s victory established a growing Asian dominance at the Venice festival. Directors from the continent have won six of the last 10 Golden Lion awards.

Lee said however he was accepting the prize “in the shadow of the passing of two great giants, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, I realise how huge this festival has become.”

He dedicated the award to Bergman, whom he saw while working on “Lust, Caution.” Bergman died on July 30, and Antonioni of Italy one day later.

“Ingmar hugged me the way a mother hugs a child,” Lee said, adding: “This hug was not for me, it was for you, the keepers of cinema.”

The movie, called “Se, Ji” in Chinese, is a tense drama set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in the 1940s.

Novice actress Tang Wei plays a resistance spy who slowly lets her target, a powerful political figure played by Tony Leung, take over her heart.

“Lust, Caution,” Lee said, “has taken me to some very difficult places. I have invited you to come along with me and in the end to stay down there with me.”

De Palma’s “Redacted,” a dramatisation of the rape and murder of an Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers, was honoured on Friday with the Future Film Festival Digital Award, for the best use of animation or visual effects.

De Palma, who is best known for the psychic thriller “Carrie” and the gangster movie “Scarface” (1983), turns 67 on Tuesday.

“Redacted,” which is based on the actual March 2006 rape and murder of a 14-year-old schoolgirl by U.S. soldiers who also slaughtered her family, is a reaction to what De Palma sees as sanitized media accounts of the Iraq war presented in the United States.

In 1989, De Palma made 1989 “Casualties of War” about the gang rape and murder of a young girl in the Vietnam War.

Blanchett played one of seven characters representing different phases of Bob Dylan’s life in the kaleidoscopic biopic by Todd Haynes, “I’m Not There.” She was not present to accept the best actress award.

“I’m sorry I can’t stand here throwing my arms around Todd, weeping just like a woman,” she said in a statement read out at the ceremony.

The movie also won one of two special jury awards bestowed by the all-director jury led by Zhang Yimou of China.

Nor was Pitt on hand to accept his best actor award for “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Harold Ford.”

The two-and-a-half-hour saga directed by Andrew Dominik explores the complex relationship between the outlaw and his admirer turned traitor.

The jury bestowed a special 75th anniversary Golden Lion on legendary Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, 67, who was given a standing ovation lasting more than 10 minutes.

A second special award went to Franco-Tunisian director Abdellatif Kechiche for “La Graine et Le Mulet” (The Secret of the Grain), a saga about a Tunisian immigrant family in France which also picked up an award for Best Young Actress, Hafsia Herzi.

Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov won a special Lion for the “consistent brilliance” of his work, which reflects “great humanity and emotion and the complexity of existence.”

Mikhalkov, 62, presented “12” at this year’s festival, a rowdy courtroom drama about a Russian jury asked to convict a Chechen youth for the murder of his stepfather.

In accepting the best screenplay award, Loach paid tribute to his cast, which starred upcoming British actress Kierston Wareing as a gritty single mother and entrepreneur.

Loach thanked the “hundreds of workers, legal and illegal,” that he met while making the film.

Set in a down-and-out section of London plagued by gangs and full of job-hungry migrants, the film starts with Angie, played by Wareing, trying to make a better life for herself with apparent empathy for the workers who come to her recruitment agency in search of work.

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